Counterfeiting and diversion, or product sales to unauthorized regions or distributors are prevalent in the distribution industry. Such activities may result in loss of revenue from the sale of genuine products, as well as brand dilution, having a negative impact on future product sales. In the case of unauthorized distribution, the brand company pricing problems could result.
In the wine industry, where so much of the revenue relies on brand name, this problem is particularly acute. Therefore, packaging of wine that offers protection from fraud would be valuable. However, there are alternative wine closures are substitute closures used in the wine industry for sealing wine bottles in place of traditional cork closures. These synthetic corks are made from plastic compounds designed to look and “pop” like natural cork, but without the risk of TCA contamination.
Types of wines are most often packaged in glass bottles and depending on the kind or quality of the wine, the bottles are sealed with a cork. Some wines, such as champagnes, are corked with stoppers, or closures, having enlarged heads and which can be grasped and twisted. However the majority of red, white and rose wines are “corked” with closures made out of cork which is recessed in the neck of the bottle requiring some implement such as a corkscrew to extract the cork. Though there are other wines that are bottle packaged with “screw tops” and movement in this direction is obviously predicated to some extent on meeting consumer's demands for packaging which is easily opened without the necessity of additional equipment.
Various methods and systems exist for fraud protection, including technology to protect against counterfeiting and diversion. Bar codes and complex labels can be effective, however, sophisticated means of fraud exist for higher end products. A determination of a fraudulent product may require chemical analysis, resulting in high costs and delay for a manufacturer and distributor.
In order to overcome the limitations of holograms and enhance the level of security while preserving the ability to verify authenticity, manufacturers of certain products, including premium products such as alcoholic beverages and other expensive yet difficult to detect fraudulent products, wireless solutions that combine RFID or NFC tags with reader devices. One particularly convenient implementation—due to the wide availability of NFC-capable smartphones (500 million in use by 2014 and 1 billion to be sold worldwide from 2014 and 2015) combines NFC (13.56 MHz High Frequency (HF) RFID) tags with NFC-capable smartphones. In this implementation, NFC tags are placed in such a way that opening the protected product destroys the NFC tag, generally by breaking the antenna in some way (for example, poking the antenna with a corkscrew or twisting and breaking the antenna in the act of opening a screw-top container). This means that cloud services that authenticate protected items based on the NFC tag's ID cannot be used after the protected item has been opened.
In many instances, wine fraud occurs when the wine bottle is molested to change either the wine, or the bottle itself. The wines can be adulterated, usually with the addition of cheaper products such as juices and sometimes with the addition of harmful chemicals and sweeteners to compensate in color or flavor. Another form, is the substitution of labels, with cheap poor quality products sold under the labels of more expensive better wines. It is known that Federal governments and individual producers have taken many efforts in order to curb the prevalence of wine fraud. Some examples include marking bottles with engraved serial numbers on the glass and taking more control of the distribution process of their wines. Better documentation of the wine bottles can also help reduce wine fraud. However, for older vintages, the threat of fraud persists.
It is well known that a container stopper, especially for wine, is generally made from cork, which is an impermeable, buoyant material. Because of its impermeability, buoyancy, elasticity and fire retardant properties, cork is used in a variety of products, the most common of which is for wine stoppers. Multiple types of container closures may have other components and materials integrated therein.
Near-field communication (NFC) is a type of radio frequency communication technology, operating at about 13.56 MHz and at bandwidth of about 2 MHz, which allows for read-only and read-write communications between a NFC-enabled RF tag reader and a NFC-enabled tag. NFC operation is based on inductive coupling between two loop antennas, which allows for sharing of power and data between NFC-enabled devices.
RFID tags are similar to NFC tags, however, they have a greater range. NFC tags have a basic architecture that is similar to RFID tags. They both have a storage memory, along with a radio chip attached to an antenna. A difference is that NFC tags are formatted to be used with NFC systems. NFC tags are small and inexpensive enough to integrate into a wide variety of products.
Even though the above cited methods for detecting wine fraud address some of the needs of the market, a container fraud detection system and method that integrates a wireless communication device tag into a container top, or elsewhere on the container, and then tracks and analyzes information from the tag to predict fraud is still desired.